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August 17, 2015

Complaint filed against Tehelka magazine after its cover story referred to Bal Thackeray as terrorist

Tehelka 2015-08-22 , Issue 34 Volume 12

        Who Is The Biggest Terrorist Of Them All..?

Why does “collective conscience” take a holiday when it comes to the
victims of riots orchestrated to further the cause of majoritarian politics?

        MATHEW SAMUEL

The protagonist of majoritarian politics Bal Thackeray Photo : AFP

The rage generated by the hanging of Yakub Memon for the 1993 Bombay
bombings will not die down anytime soon. While some continue with the chest
thumping, others decry the barbarity of capital punishment. But there is
also a significant minority that refuses to buy the State’s argument that
Yakub was killed to send a “powerful message” to the terrorist groups and
is anguished by how the Indian State targets the minorities in the name of
counter-terrorism even as it refuses to acknowledge that majoritarian
Hindutva politics is to blame just as much as Islamic militancy for
terrorising the people of India. A simple question that the State has
failed to address so far is how was the massacre of Muslims in Bombay in
the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition any less an act of organised terror
than the bombings that it provoked.
In other words, what is it about bombs that makes their use by underground
groups a crime more heinous in the eyes of the State than the use of
swords, petrol cans, LPG cylinders and other low-tech instruments of brutal
murder and mayhem by organised mobs of rioters who swear by Hindutva and
are egged on by leaders from the bully pulpit? Why are “terrorists” of the
first kind hounded by agencies of the State, caught, tortured and killed in
cold blood in extrajudicial encounters or by hanging, while the second kind
— the merchants of mayhem — end up in positions of authority and are
honoured with State funerals after they die?

One example of this anti-minority orientation of the Indian State are the
double standards applied to Yakub and the other accused in the Bombay
blasts case, on the one hand, and the late Bal Thackeray and his Shiv
Sainiks who were indicted by the Justice BN Srikrishna Commission for
orchestrating the anti-Muslim violence that preceded the bombings, on the
other. Yakub’s hanging juxtaposed with the State funeral by the erstwhile
Congress-led UPA government for the Shiv Sena supremo is a powerful emblem
of this discriminatory and prejudiced understanding that seriously
impairs India’s fight against terror. [. . .]

Full Text: http://www.tehelka.com/2015/08/who-is-the-biggest-terrorist-of-them-all/?singlepage=1